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About the author

Tomáš Janeček, enthusiastic about everything that looks like a code. I created this blog so time by time, I write something to post here. I love sports. Currently, I study at FIM University of Hradec Králové and when I'm not busy, I code and program in WebPrezent company.

How to make Firefox much faster

Published on 23.11.2013 - 11:14

I had used Opera as my main browsers for both web developing and browsing the internet. Why would I wanna be between those 5% people? It's very fast, definitely faster than Firefox. Firefox is not slow, not when I'm running it on a pretty decent SSD, but when I decided to switch to Firefox, I just couldn't get used to it. So I searched, how to make Firefox quicker.

I was concerned mainly about the three following points

Slow launching

Slower page loading

Slow mousewheel scrolling

Solution? Here it is

Mozilla Firefox launching too slow => Firefox Preloader

The biggest problem of Firefox. It took like 3-4 seconds to start on my SSD, which is pretty much in my opinion. The time has to be much longer on a standard HDD - pretty anoying, isn't it? Now it starts withing a second.

There's a thing called Firefox Preloader. It's an application that starts with your Windows and holds the key components of Mozilla Firefox. Therefore, each Firefox launch doesn't need to load almost anymore data into RAM, so it's kinda fast. The preloader takes like 100 MB of your launch right after start, which is not that much in comparison with today standard RAM size (4-8 GB). This saves you so much time that it would be worth it even for 1 GB of your RAM. Hardly any computer uses 8 GB anyway.

Set Pipelining and proxy.pipelining to TRUE with a double click and maxrequest to 8, default values are false and 32.

A smart visitors has sent me a link to this post: The Truth About The Firefox Pipelining Trick. After reading it, it's clear how pipelining works. Basically, HTTP requests are sequential, so there goes one and the other only after the previous is finished. Using pipelining, you can make up to 8 simultaneous requests - yes, at once, which makes your pages load much faster. One more note - don't try to set the maxrequests value higher than 8, it would have no effects. Confirmed here.

Slow scrolling

Another but last thing annoyed me a lot about FF. I could scroll like a best and I still scrolled slowly. It was so bad that it was faster to click on the scrollbar on the right and scroll with it instead of mousewheel. Pretty ineffective, that's what it was like. No more now, support forum of Mozilla helped me.

Again, you have to write into your address field the following:

about:config

The alert showed can be ignored again (if it shows at all). Search for these two items:

mousewheel.enable_pixel_scrolling
mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount

Set Pixel_scrolling to FALSE and the problem is partially solved. If you want it even better, set scroll_amount value to 25 or even a bit more. I tried values like 100, but that's just too much for me.

Conclusion

All the changes made in about:config are taking into account immediately so you can try your tweaks pretty quickly to see if you got what you expected. I hope there might be some people who'd like this article - I'd be so desperate if I couldn't fix these issues that I wouldn't use FF ever again.